~Robert Louis Stevenson
Last week we started talking about influences and inspirations, and I’ll be honest: talking about Star Wars got completely away from me. It happens. This is my second weekly column, and the thing I learned about it last time is that there’s no need to rush. When you get into a groove, go with it. So that’s what I did, and as a result, we ended up getting about three pages of Star Wars. And nothing else. Which is not to say that that was the plan or even that I don’t have other influences besides George Lucas. ‘Cause that ain’t true at all. In fact, I find the unedited Lucas to be every bit as plodding, wooden, and overly sentimental as even the harshest of his critics make him out to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that his first trilogy was consciously built around a story model that’s imminently useful to Dungeon Masters the world over. And yeah, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are both great, wonderful movies. But with that said, in my own games, we’re not out there trying to overthrow the evil empire every week. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true.
So where do I get my ideas? Well, the short answer is lots of places. Let’s start with one of my favorite failures.
If you don’t remember or never knew, CrossGen Comics executed perhaps the single greatest independent comic publisher flameout in the history of the medium. The company exploded onto the scene from parts unknown some time in 1998, publishing a full slate of full-color comics, complete with a massive shared-world universe on the scale of those currently on offer from Marvel, DC, or even Wizards of the Coast via Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms. At the height of the its power, CrossGen published several of my favorite titles, including a clever spy spoof (Kiss Kiss Bang Band—no relation to the movie of the same name), a fascinating fantasy genre piece with an appealing female lead who was neither slut nor lesbian nor always running around in a wet T-Shirt or chainmail bikini (Barbara Kesel’s* Meridian), one of the very few decent sci fi comics ever to make it into full color release (Negation, which I think was ostensibly the company’s primary title), and finally, the comics license for R.A. Salvatore’s Demon Wars property, which in my humble opinion was MUCH better in its comic form than it was as a straight prose-piece. But like I said, CrossGen flared out in a supernova of creative brilliance, having outrun and out-produced its nascent financing by a factor of ten or more.
So why bring it up?
Well, as part of their full-scale rollout, CrossGen had none other than Barbara Kesel write up the company’s submissions guidelines, a task that she must have taken to with gusto because the result she produced was by far the most useful guide I’ve ever seen for a new would-be comic producer trying to learn to pitch his ideas. I regret that I don’t remember all of it, and alas the original page itself is no longer extant, but from what I recall, Ms. Kesel outlined three basic rules for pitches. Of those, two have stuck with me, and I’ve never violated them for any reason:
1. Never pitch a story that involves any kind of humanoid invasion.
2. Never pitch a story that involves a war between Heaven and Hell.
Folks, that’s good advice.
Now look, to be clear, I trusted Ms. Kesel’s advice instinctively the first time I ever saw it. But it wasn’t until later—when I owned my own small press comic company—that I learned WHY it was good advice. The reason is simple: those two ideas have been beaten to death. You’re never gonna find anything new down either of those roads. Better men than you have walked them and mapped them out in great detail. There’s nothing there for you. Nothing at all. You’re much better off to just steer clear. With luck, you’ll plot your own course down a different, less-traveled road.
Seriously, my little company was only in existence for about 18 months, but in that time we must have taken at least a hundred pitches from folks, and in NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE we saw either an invasion by some ancient evil with its army of evil humanoid minions, or a war between Heaven and Hell, or more likely, both in the same story! And the really odd thing about all of those identical pitches was this: in damned near every case, the guy submitting the idea started his cover letter with some variation of the statement, “I want to pitch you the idea for a story I’ve had in my head ever since I was 4 years old!” All of which brings me to my own, third, basic rule of writing a story, a rule that is 100% mine but which owes its existence to Ms. Kesel and her oh-so-helpful CrossGen submissions guidelines:
3. Never pitch a story that you made up when you were 4 years old.
Seriously. You’re older now. Wiser. Smarter even. You see the world differently, and it’s a good bet that your target audience will see the world differently, too. So it’s time to move on. Do yourself a favor and try it. See the world through your ADULT eyes.
Now look, I recognize that DMing is more than a little different than pitching a comic story. As a DM, you are the all-knowing, all-seeing, ultimate power in the universe. That’s heady stuff. And as such, your players, should they choose to stick around, will have no choice but go down whatever road you lead them. But this is not a reason to endlessly rehash the same bargain basement plotlines that’ve been clanking around in the D&D dungeons for the last thirty years. Or, to put it another way, yes, you can abuse your players with the same old crap time after time, but that doesn’t make it right.
So then. How to come up with something innovative?
In his book, Characters and Viewpoint, author Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) outlines a plotting technique that I personally use all the time. He starts with a question: “What can go wrong?” And then he lays out a series of possibilities, no less than seven, as answers to his question. His theory is that the first five or six ideas you come up with are likely to be the obvious ones, so that you’re not really into the good stuff until you get to idea number seven. In my own experience, I’ve found this to be correct with the important caveat that sometimes the obvious things are useful too so long as they’re incorporated with some kind of creative twist.
I’ll give you an example:
In my game The Sellswords of Luskan, my PCs have taken a few decidedly anti-social turns, so that at this point they’re actively involved in the slave trade. After one particularly climactic battle, they took treasure in the form of slaves. About 20 to be exact, dwarves and spellscarred children, with a total value that I set arbitrarily at 5,000 golds. So... what could go wrong?
1. Well, you just can’t frog-march dwarf slaves through a city. Even in Luskan, that’s going to draw attention, and most dwarves are pugnacious and combatitve. So, clearly the PCs are setting themselves up to get attacked by an angry dwarf. Let’s call him Thoradin.
2. The PCs could lose the fight.
3. The fight could inadvertently start a riot.
4. The riot could set the city on fire!
5. The PCs could be followed back to their lair by dwarf sympathizers who then call down the paladins of Moradin on them.
6. The PCs might win the fight, only to discover that Thoradin had been one of the most popular people in city. Thus they become outcasts, even in Luskan.
7. Similarly, the PCs could win but then discover that Thoradin was the only man who’d been able to successfully run the goblin blockade outside the city. With him dead, there’s now no one left alive who can get food into Luskan. Mass starvation ensues!
8. Again similarly, the PCs could win the fight but then have the Shield of Mirabar lodge a formal protest, forcing the PCs to defend their honor against a Mirabarran champion in Luskan’s dreaded Grand Arena.
9. Or maybe Jarlaxle and his band strike quickly, using the chaos of the pitched battle/street riot to turn the tables and enslave the slavers. The drow then carry off the whole lot—sellswords, dwarves, and spellscarred children—into the lightless Hell of the Underdark.
10. Etc, ad naseum. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
In the event, I’ll admit that I was sorely tempted to use #5. However, after giving the matter some thought, I felt that #1 was so obvious that I simply had to use it. First, my PCs had made a deliberate choice to engage in slavery, and since that was a decidedly evil choice, I felt that it needed to have immediate and public consequences. By using #1, I established that slavery is lucrative but also extremely dangerous, an idea that I’ve come back to several times since. Because look, at a certain level my PCs set themselves against the world. That’s fine, but the world needs to put up a fight. And then, too, a lot of the other ideas were contingent on #1 occurring, so to set them up, I had to start with the battle with Thoradin.
After that I ran #8 and then #7, setting up both a gladiatorial contest that the players enjoyed a great deal and then a chance for the PCs to do some good for the city by relieving its starvation. To a certain extent, this served to balance their reputation within the city, which was good. I don’t mind a little evil in my campaign, but I also don’t want the game to turn into a truly chaotic mix of deliberate murder, slavery, and human sacrifice. Too much of a good thing is indeed too much.
And so there you have it. A few basic guidelines on what’s not likely to work well and a technique that I use a lot to come up with alternatives. Not bad, especially considering that the source was a defunct comic company of dubious reputation. Next week, I’ll try to wrap up this discussion of influences and inspirations, but I don’t want to make any promises. Until then, let’s just see how it goes.
*: In addition to her rather extensive CrossGen portfolio, Barbara Kesel is probably best known for her work on the DC titles Hawk and Dove and Elseworld’s Finest: Batgirl and Supergirl. Within the industry, her editing credits are more extensive than her writing credits, including a pair of Hellboy TPB collections and quite a bit of other, very innovative mainstream stuff.
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